Flipping Junkie is a podcast for people addicted to flipping houses and real estate investing. Subscribe for weekly episodes with interviews from regular Joe house flippers that have become successful flipping houses as well as expert real estate investors sharing their best secrets on how to flip houses for big profits. Find out in detail, what is working today, to find great deals for flipping, how to properly analyze deals for flipping, renting and owner financing, determine repair costs, find contractors and manage rehab crews, what improvements to make and how to quickly sell your houses for big profits. Don’t worry, we won’t leave out the serious mistakes that you need to avoid when get starting and growing your real estate investing business. Join Danny Johnson to get the inside scoop on how to get started in this life changing business that has such huge potential to create financial freedom for you and your family.

Register for the SEO and Content Marketing Webinar at http://leadpropeller.com/webinar

This is the final of four episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.

In this episode the focus is mainly on search engine optimization and using content marketing to rank your site. We’re covering white hat versus black hat SEO, on-page and off-page SEO and all about content marketing in this episode.

Find out why Danny chose not to build LeadPropeller real estate investor websites on Wordpress and why you should care.

Discover these4 Steps to Creating a Great Blog Post

Determine the best keyword to focus on

Come up with a great title

Write the article

Search engine optimize (SEO) the blog post

Be sure to sign up for the webinar being held on December 13th at 7:00 pm CST by visiting http://leadpropeller.com/webinar

This is the third of four episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.

In this episode the focus is mainly on pay per click. We’re covering using Google Adwords as a real estate investor to generate awesome motivated seller leads…even within a week of setting up a new website.

Today, we’re talking about PPC (which stands for Pay Per Click) and generating leads the first week of having your website live.

Pay per click, not paperclip, is where you post ads online and pay for each click on those ads. The main services for pay per click are Google’s Adwords and Bing Ads.

This is the absolute best way to start generating leads for your website immediately. With adwords and bing ads, you pay money to have your ads displayed in the search results. Based on several factors that we’ll cover shortly, you can have your ads displayed above ALL organic search results. Basically at the top of the page for the best keywords out there.

Think about how awesome that is! You can beat websites that have been online for years, your first week getting leads online. Of course, you will have to pay for those leads, but these tend to be some of the best motivated seller leads available.

This is because these motivated sellers are seeking you out. They are ready to sell and are looking for a buyer.

Be sure to listen to next week’s podcast where Danny will share with you how to rank your site faster and higher using SEO (search engine optimization) and content marketing for real estate investors.

This is the second of four episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.

In this episode the focus is mainly on generating traffic to your website. So, let’s get going and talk about how to promote your website to start generating leads right away without waiting for your site to rank at the top of the search engines...which can take up to a year with diligent effort. We’ll talk about that and SEO a lot more in a couple weeks on the 4th podcast episode in this subseries.

Don’t Expect: ‘Build it and they will come’

The internet isn’t the field of dreams.

Just building a website doesn’t do anything for you unless people know about it. They either find out about it through promotion: which is what we are talking about today or through finding it online themselves: which is what we are covering in the next 2 episodes.

The biggest mistake real estate investors make with a website is getting a website and then doing nothing to promote it.

Promotion does require some work, but the results can land you great deals that generate tens of thousands of dollars.

Whenever I hear someone say, “I haven’t received a single lead from my website”, it’s almost always because they never promoted it or didn’t promote it long enough. It’s the equivalent of complaining you didn’t get a deal from your direct mail campaign after you send out 500 postcards one time.

You Need a Plan

Just as you plan your direct mail with who you are mailing, when and how often and which letters, you need to have a plan to constantly promote your website. You wouldn’t print 1,000 letters and never mail them, so don’t build a website and not promote it.

The ideas I give you today will allow you to create your website promotion plan.

Be sure to listen to next week’s podcast where Danny will share with you how to generate the best motivated seller leads using pay per click (adwords) marketing.

Be sure to sign up for the webinar being held on November 15th at 7:00 pm CST by visiting http://leadpropeller.com/webinar

Register for the Online Lead Generation for Real Estate Investors Webinar at http://leadpropeller.com/webinar

This is the first of three episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.

In this episode the focus is mainly on what makes a high-converting website. Danny covers all of the details to make sure you build credibility, how forms should be structured, what questions should be asked, how to eliminate competition.

Be sure to listen to next weeks podcast where Danny will share with you how to promote your website to start generating leads even before it ranks in the search engines. It’s going to be awesome.

Be sure to sign up for the webinar being held on November 15th at 7:00 pm CST by visiting http://leadpropeller.com/webinar

This episode is short and sweet just covering what's coming up on the next episodes of the podcast. We'll be talking about online lead generation and how it is the top lead and deal generating marketing we are doing. If you have questions about online lead generation that you want answered, please visit https://facebook.com/flippingjunkie and ask there. I'll do my best to answer all questions in the coming episodes.

Brett Snodgrass is an awesome real estate investor in Indianapolis, IN.He’s been a full time real estate wholesaler for about 10 years now, and it has been an incredible business that God has used to provide for him and his family. He’s a simple guy, He loves taking his little beater-boat out on the lake, spending time with his wife and kids and enjoying the relationships he has around him.

Today, Brett shared with us his direct mail strategy where he sends out over 20,000 pieces per month and landing roughly 10 deals.

What I enjoyed was the discussion on getting leads from HUD. HUD stands for Housing and Urban Development and they are responsible for selling off FHA foreclosures.

HUD sells there homes auction style through the HUD Home Store (hudhomestore.com). You can bid on these houses and land some awesome deals.

Brett shares with us his exact system for making offers on these HUD houses. I especially like how he describes his filtering process to make sure that he’s not wasting his time. This is information that took him months to determine and we get to listen in and save all that time and effort.

Brett knows how to buy houses from HUD, HUD foreclosures. His system for buying they HUD homes is awesome, from offering 25% of list price and just fishing for counters to knowing when they are more likely to accept an offer, it’s all here in this episode.

Learn how to buy houses from HUD with this episode where I interview Brett Snodgrass.

Justin Williams has been a full-time investor for over 9 years. He’s flipped over 500 houses. He considers himself a house flipping machinist. What he means by that is that he is all about building systems so that he could scale quickly and do more with his time.

Show notes can be found at http://flippingjunkie.com/51

In today’s episode, we talk about what amounts to a paradigm shift for most investors. There are three steps to revolutionize your house flipping business:

1. Generating leads on a regular basis

2. Converting those leads

3. Increasing profit

Justin’s whole approach is to focus on those three points, nail down the processes and then scale it. It’s really that simple. Maybe not easy to do, but simple.

Justin has done this with his own business and helped many other investors do the same. Trying to figure it all out yourself would not be the best use of your time.

The best use of your time is learning from someone with the experience and ability to teach you every step of the way.

Justin has just opened the doors to his House Flipping Formula program. You can get access to it here: http://houseflippingformula.com/danny

Rod Khleif is a passionate real estate investor who has personally owned and managed over 2000 apartments and homes. As an entrepreneur, Rod has built several multi-million dollar businesses. As a community philanthropist, Rod’s work has benefited more than 45,000 underprivileged children and families.

Rod discussesculling a list to make it more accurate and actual outbound calling which he’s done successfully. He speaks to knocking on doors which he did in Denver to buy some of the 500 houses he owned there on a buy and hold strategy. He’s found if you’re willing to do what others aren’t you’ll be successful and he happily talks about all of that in today’s episode of the Flipping Junkie Podcast.

Rod has bought hundreds of houses by door knocking on houses that were facing foreclosure. Here’s what he did:

He would get the pre-foreclosure list (sometimes referred to as the Notice of Default or NOD list) and then design a route to go to the houses.

He focused on going in the evening after 5:15 when people were more likely to be at home. If they were not home, he would leave his card (that said something along the lines of ‘Foreclosure Assistance Specialist’). He would then try again on Saturday.

Persistence. That’s what lands deals. Huge deals. He was doing what most investors still won’t do to this day!

When the homeowner is home, you must genuinely care about helping them. If you only care about making a buck, go and chase bank-owned MLS properties….door knocking is not for you. Homeowners will smell a shark a mile away.

Ask them questions to guide them through the conversation. You’ll need to build rapport so that they’ll talk openly with you so that you can offer up solutions to their foreclosure.

Rod liked to ask them what options they’ve already considered. This is a good way to get the conversation going.

Rod makes sure to verify the accuracy of his mailing lists and will look for phone numbers of the owners. This is also something most real estate investors do not do. If you are serious about real estate investing, finding the owners, finding their phone numbers and calling them can net you big deals.

You can find out what service he uses to verify the accuracy of his lists and find phone numbers by visiting the show notes page at http://flippingjunkie.com/50

Over 6 years of developing and building a owner finance real estate investment company. Starting from scratch he has figured out the best way to create and sell real estate notes. He currently "flips” 75+ houses and notes a year and are shooting for 100. He’s been in real estate for over 15 years and have done a little bit of every kind of investing. His passion is in the creation of real estate notes because it affects the most people. You are helping the seller by buying their house. Then the neighborhood by rehabbing it. The buyer by offering owner finance and the investor by creating a good quality real estate note.

Erik was on episode 27 where we talked aboutFinding and Working with the “Right” Contractors

Erik is on track to do 100 deals this year. Obviously, to do a 100 deals in a year, you’ve got to be good at marketing for motivated seller leads. While Erik does do direct mail to find motivated sellers, he also uses other methods.

Today we talk about those other methods. We focus today’s episode on using bandit signs. Disclaimer: Check with your local city offices to make sure it’s legal for you to put signs out. They are illegal in a lot of places.

He shares a great tip on getting 4x8 sheets of corrugated plastic that he cuts down into bandit signs that have odd shapes. These signs grab much more attention than printed signs. He then writes on them with giant markers.

This is the way to go to get maximum benefit out of bandit signs.

The next thing we talk about is using newspaper ads to generate motivated seller leads. While print newspapers are dying and don’t get the readership they used to, you can still get ads displayed in them and online as most have a website now.

The great thing about online newspaper classifieds is that you can now have your ad show to visitors that might not even go into the classified section of the newspaper. There are a lot of possibilities here and not a lot of competition.

We also talk about using Facebook to target the exact demographics of people investors normally buy from. This varies greatly by area and also by investor, so it’s more up to you to determine which demographics you should target.

Facebook is just another medium to have your message displayed in front of people that might need your services. Why not take advantage of the power of Facebook ads to generate motivated sellers leads for your real estate investing business?

Don was on episode 36. Be sure to visit the show notes page at http://flippingjunkie.com/36 to download his Joint Venture Agreement.

Don Costa, is a married father of 3 kids. He has been in the real estate business for over 10 years.He started Knocking on doors and wholesaling properties, and then quickly moved to flipping houses. Currently his office is on track to do a 100 flips this year.

Don is a networking machine! He is on track to do more than 20 flips this year solely from his networking efforts. Crazy!

Networking as a real estate investor is one of the cheapest ways to generate leads and deals and is probably the least utilized method of all.

Don mentions that he feels networking to be the best way to use Other People’s Marketing. Many investors use Other People’s Money, but few use Other People’s Marketing.

He calls all the marketing from other investors in his area and quickly asks if the investor is a wholesaler or a cash buyer.

His conversation is then guided by whichever the investor mentions they are.

If they are a cash buyer, Don wants to find out if they’d be interested in lending on a deal or joint venturing and splitting profits.

If they are a real estate wholesaler, he wants to know how many deals they’ve done. If they haven’t done many deals, he invites them to his offer and provides coaching. This is awesome because he is building a relationship with a new wholesaler that could bring him deals for years to come.

He even offers to do deal analysis for wholesalers so they know they already have a buyer at a given price. This takes almost all the risk out of the deal for them…which is invaluable when you are new to this business.

In this episode, we do a little role playing to see exactly what Don says when he calls real estate investors. The insights are incredible.

Listen to the episode to get the tips that have helped Don Costa to generate over 20 flip deals this year alone.

Jim has been a real estate investor in Northern Illinois since 2007, He is also a licensed real estate agent (IL) and has been since 2005. He started out as an aggressive new agent helping investors buy and sell their rehab properties. Then he quickly realized he was on the wrong side of that transaction and that is when he decided to become a real estate investor myself. These days his primary focus as an investor is residential redevelopment (aka rehabbing). He primarily works in Chicago and its NW suburbs and had used his local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) to get 75% of his rehab deals over the last 8 years. Since he got into the real estate business he has been involved in over 450 transactions.His company does 8-10 rehabs at any one time. Though Jim is an active investor he spends as much of his time as possible with his 4 year old twins, Liam & Claire, and his awesome wife who stays home with them. He told us "Everything changed when I had kids. Suddenly I looked at everything differently and literally changed almost everything in my life. I got healthy, quit drinking, lost 50lbs and have never looked back. Life is much more enjoyable on this side of your health".

Jim’s secret to getting great deals on the MLS starts with planting the right seeds with the real estate agents involved. Effective communication is absolutely necessary.

You have to convince the listing agent so that they will convince the seller that your offer is worth considering and ultimately worth accepting.

Jim has bought tons of houses where his offer wasn’t the highest but he convinced the agents that his was the best offer. To make his offers more appealing he does the following:

1. Waives the inspection

2. Informs the agent that other investors and potential buyers include inspections because they will likely renegotiate after the inspection.

3. If not a bank-owned property, he tells the listing agent to inform the seller that, when he through fixing up the house, most of his houses are sold to young families.

4. He puts up a strong earnest money deposit (around $5,000 for a house with an ARV between $400k and $500k).

5. He puts in for a 2 week closing.

Agents hardly ever know what a seller is going to be willing to take for their house. They all have assumptions and we know what assumptions do…

So, don’t ever rely on a listing agent telling you their client will never entertain a low offer. This is crap. They are obligated to submit all offers, so go ahead and submit yours and try to convince the agent of the real benefits of your offer (not just price).

Jim also mentioned that 90% of his MLS deals required follow up. He usually does this using hotsheets to automatically check for status changes for the listings.

If you want to win even more deals, it’s best to have a system in place to remind you to follow up just before typical price changes. There’s no way to guarantee when there will be a price change but you can set up reminders for yourself for each property very easily in REImobile so that you can set it and forget it.

The criteria for properties he makes offers on are usually based on location but also the presence of one of the following keywords:

As a Wholesaler with just over 3 years of experience, Tom has had explosive growth. As head “Rhino” of the most successful Tribe of Wholesalers on the planet he has had the fortune of meeting true Go Givers and being a part of some of the best real estate deals in the industry.

When he’s not writing, podcasting or creating courses that force others to succeed, you’ll find him spending time with his wife and 4 children or vacationing in favorite spots like Key Largo, Hilton Head, Charleston and Savanah.

Currently he is writing his first book, working title “Wholesaling Real Estate Like A Rhino, A No BS No Fluff Step-By-Step Blueprint To Wholesale A House Right Now” is slated for release this fall.

In this episode, Tom shares his top 8 direct mail lists for motivated sellers as a real estate investor.

The best direct mail lists are:

1. Tax Delinquent List - criteria: 2 years behind, are still the homeowner

Tom shares lots of pearls of wisdom in this episode that pertain to investing in general. One of these nuggets is from Jack Bosch. He says that you will get 5 no’s before you get a yes when asking people at your local government offices for each of these lists.

The first, second, third, fourth, and even fifth person you talk will tell you the list doesn’t exist or that they cannot give it to you. The sixth person will say, ‘Here ya go!”

Tom also shares a great tip from his friend, Mark Evans: ‘Data not Drama’ He is referring to keeping track of your mailing campaigns and the results you are getting.

We make this super easy in REImobile with our Direct Mail Module. Check it out here: http://reimobile.com

Tom also talks about how ‘Money is in the Database’. You have to keep track of your leads and follow up! …this is also exactly the reason why we developed REImobile…

He’s a graduate of Ball State University living with my beautiful and super supportive wife in Indianapolis, Indiana. Prior to becoming a real estate professional he worked as Healthcare Technology Education Consultant at Indiana University Health. He’s also a successful poker player with a few TV final tables…which I found super interesting.

He’s spent the past several years learning all that he could about real estate and applying it so that he could provide enough income to support his family.

The education has paid off and he’s now a full-time real estate investor in Indianapolis.

Ben started by following my Flipping Junkie blog and went on to take my wholesaling training course FreedomByFlipping (http://freedombyflipping.com).

He’s grown his business and has staff helping him already. During this episode, Ben shares how he doesn’t focus at all on what his letters say as he simply outsources them to Jerry Puckett who handles the list and mailing them for Ben.

During the conversation we make special note of the importance of credibility when marketing to motivated sellers through direct mail.

Ben mentions how important it is to be a member of the chamber of commerce, better business bureau and have other professional credibility and endorsements.

Testimonials are huge. Ben advises to get and show testimonials whenever possible.

He always has motivated sellers tell him they called him because of the testimonials and reviews they saw.

Doug was born in Colorado Springs, CO and raised in Carlsbad New Mexico. After high school he ventured west to the sunny coast of Southern California. It was there he met his beautiful bride Andrea, who happens to share his entrepreneurial spirit!

As newlyweds, they ventured back to Colorado and started Mountain High Concessions, a Kettle Corn vender for special events and sporting/concert venues. Mountain High Concessions became the first Kettle popcorn vender for the Denver Broncos at Mile High Stadium. They were itching to get back to So Cal and they sold the concessions company and got started in Real Estate!

16 years and 3 kids later, they are the proud owners of one of Southern California's largest wholesale real estate purchasing companies! They operate the business together along with our incredible team! Over the past decade he has worked as a California Certified Residential Appraiser from 2003-2010. Since 2008, he and Andrea have purchased and sold over 250 properties in Southern California and manage their in-house rental property portfolio.

In this episode, Doug shares with us how he started by sending out about 1,000 postcards each month that had the ‘Urgent Notice’ message on them to absentee owners. His response rate then was about 2% to 4%…which is incredible!

Too bad everyone else started doing it and now the response rates are much, much lower. Typical investor response rates on direct mail is around .5% (half a percent).

Doug is now mailing around 20,000 pieces PER MONTH! He’s definitely dialed in his message and list in order to be comfortable mailing that much.

Instead of post cards, Doug now mails letters that are more professional. They have his business name and logo on them. He also includes a picture of himself and his family.

I think this is where direct mail for real estate investors is headed. Too many people are mailing yellow letters that come across as “iffy”. If you get a letter in the mail from a complete stranger that says they want to buy your house and to call them…and that’s all…your BS meter is probably being pegged.

Doug uses propertyradar.com for his lists. They are only available for west coast states. He used to get his lists from listsource.com (where most investors still get their lists).

His criteria for his absentee owners list is:

House older than 20 years

Bought 4+ years ago

With more than 60% equity

Less than 3,000 sqft

Many investors have trouble figuring out what benefits to motivated sellers to list in their letters. Here are some we discussed in this episode:

We buy As-Is. Make no repairs.

Fast Cash so you can Sell Quickly

Sell without dealing with Tenants or Family Members

Pay No Commissions

Skip the Hassles

Have Confidence the Deal with Close

To come up with your own benefits, just put yourself in the shoes of motivated sellers. Consider why you would seller to investor rather than the conventional way of listing with a Realtor.

Be sure to check out the show notes page at http://flippingjunkie.com/44 to download your free guide from Doug entitled, ’11 Tips to Working Successfully with your Spouse’

Justin Colby is the Co-Founder and President of The Science of Flipping, Omni Investment Group and Phoenix Wealth Builders. The Science of Flipping is a free Podcast on itunes, Omni and PWB are both professional real estate investment companies specializing in purchase, rehab, and flipping of distressed property in the Metro Phoenix Area.

In this episode, Justin shares his story of getting started and struggling through 9 months to get his first deal. He simply didn’t have any money to get started and had to door knock and do things that cost very little.

In starting out this way, Justin was forced to learn the most efficient ways to get deals. This continued as he began using direct mail to generate motivated seller leads.

He shares with us that he had just sent out 47,000 direct mail pieces. So he’s grown over the years but knows what it takes to get started with very little money.

An important fact that he shares is that most direct mail response rates are below 1%. This fact tends to be ignored by most investors just starting out with direct mail to motivated sellers.

They might send out 500 mail pieces and only get 3 calls. This is very disheartening if you aren’t prepared for it. This is the reason we figure more than 80 to 90% of investors discontinue or change their list after only mailing one time!

When starting to send direct mail, you want to send as many as you can afford to send at least 6 times. You’ve got to mail the same mailing list your postcards and/or letters at least 6 times. The reason is that studies have shown that, for direct mail in general, 80% of sales happen after 6 touches.

Don’t be the guy that mails once and quits. Also, don’t be the guy that mails 5 times and quits. They’re almost equivalent.

The guy/gal that mails 6 or 7 times will generate a very disproportionate amount of motivated sellers leads.

Regarding whether to use postcards or letters and first class versus bulk rate or metered, it all boils down to which will be cheaper so that you can mail more pieces. When on a budget, you should always defer to what will allow you to send more.

In this episode, Justin also shares with us what he says in his postcards and letters. This is super valuable information.

We also talk about the A/B test he performed that cost him $15,000 and didn’t show any measurable difference.

Listen to the show to find out what the test was so that you can benefit from his big expense and save some money for yourself.

Joe McCall has been investing since 2006 and has an excellent podcast called the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast that he does with Alex Joungblood. He’s doing deals in multiple markets across the us while traveling for months at a time in Europe and traveling the us in an RV. He’s been teaching and coaching investing since 2011.

In this episode, Joe goes into incredible detail on how he set up and runs his direct mail marketing for motivated sellers leads.

We talk about the lists that he targets and how to get them.

He even shares when he sends postcards and when he sends letters.

A funny story during the interview was when Joe realized that he had been sending a postcard for years that he got from FlippingJunkie.com and didn’t put two and two together until that moment.

Bonus: get that postcard here http://flippingjunkie.com/41

Joe focuses on absentee owner mailings using postcards. When there is a lot of competition, he focuses on high equity owner occupied houses.

He gets his list from Listsource.com using the following criteria:

Bought at least 10 years ago

At least 40% equity

At least 3 bedroom house

Owner at least 55 years old

Specific zip codes with lots of rehab activity

One way Joe finds the most sought after areas is Trulia heat maps. He targets a county and the heat map shows cheap, median and expensive houses. There is even a table of data that can be sorted to show the most popular areas.

During the conversation we shared some numbers for the typical marketing spend per deal for investors. The numbers vary between $1,000 and $3,000 per deal and go as high as $5,000 per deal for some very competitive areas.

Mailing intervals for probates should be about once per week for the first 6 weeks or so. Mailing intervals for other lists usually are spread out from 30 to 90 days in between mailings.

One recurring theme throughout the episode was the discussion of how most investors fail to answer their phones. If there is one thing you can do to eliminate 75% or more of your competition, it’s answering your phone or calling back a seller IMMEDIATELY. Take that to the bank.

Nick Baldo started investing in real estate in 2011 with a focus on flipping houses in the Buffalo, NY area. He has since expanded his business to focus on value-added rental investments. Nick created and manages the real estate educational site, Income Digs to help aspiring real estate investors get started. He has a focus on leveraging technology to create an investment business that is both efficient and scalable.

Overview of Strategy:

Tell everyone what you do

You never know where good deals can come from

The more interactions you have, the more you are working in the industry, the more that will come to you

11 Actionable Tips for getting yourself out there and finding deals

Tell your friends

Facebook

Email blast

Social Media bio

You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars

You want people to see your brand and ask more questions

Simple business cards, shirt, signs

Set up brand

REI Meetings/ Investor meetups

Neighbors get excited about flips

They often have people in their lives who need to sell quickly

They see that flipping is not “as scary as it seems on TV”

Meet the neighbors

They might not know that they want to sell

Reach out to other landlords/ property managers in the areas where you have rentals

You should probably have one (or more) agent looking for properties for you.

Agents have pocket listings and access to info you don’t have.

Real Estate Agents

Even if you’re not doing the rehab, be on the job site. You want to be there if and when people come up and ask what is going on with the house.

Be Hands on

I personally use Podio...but if you are just starting, a simple spreadsheet will do

REImobile is setup with great features from the start

Some people like to see tangible leads.

Use sort of tracking mechanism

Building inspector

Mayor

Wholesalers

Attorneys

Accountants

Bankers

Professionals

Driving by...have a hunch about about a house? Doesn’t hurt to start the conversation.

Don’t be afraid to ask

“Bonus” - Even if it’s not a deal you find, a solid consolation prize is finding a private lender

Lamar Cannon is a real estate investor who loves to travel the world. He set up his business to allow him to do deals no matter where he is on the globe. His strengths are strategy, marketing and a strong mentality. He enjoys experiencing new cultures, trying new foods, reading, writing poetry and playing basketball.

In today’s episode Lamar and I talk about how he goes about determining which part of a city to focus his marketing on. He’s been investing in a lot of different cities outside of his home city of Austin, TX.

Investing in other cities forced him to develop a data-driven system to determine where to focus his marketing.

As a wholesaler (but almost equally as important for rehabbers), he wanted to determine which zip codes have the most action.

What he does is goes to ListSource.com and generates a list based on the following criteria:

1. Entire City (and surround areas)

2. Single-Family Houses Only

3. Last Sale Date within last 6 months

4. 99-100% Equity (shows most likely was cash buyer)

5. Absentee Owners (most likely investors bought)

6. Companies Only (filter to filter down further to make sure getting investor buys)

This is how he gets the data he wants for free…

On the last page right before checkout, you can preview your data and filter it by zip code. All he’s really interested in is the count of the matching transactions so just the record count per zip code will tell him which zip codes have the most investor transactions.

How cool is that?

Another filter he uses from time to time to determine great areas for wholesaling is the foreclosure rate for the zip codes. The more foreclosures, the more likely it is that the area isn’t being served well by investors as the houses aren’t being bought before foreclosures are happening…LESS COMPETITION!

For someone like myself that does mostly rehabs, I wouldn’t focus as much on foreclosures, rather I’d include price ranges that are near the city’s media home value as that will be the where the biggest pool of buyers is.

All in all, we shared a lot of great info in this episode to help you determine where to focus your mailing and claim your target farm area.

Melissa and I generate all of our deals almost entirely from marketing to motivated sellers. When I got my first call from my motivated seller marketing I froze….

I actually threw the phone to her for her to answer! She fumbled through it but we learned a heck of a lot from that first call.

It takes time to build up confidence when talking to motivated sellers. These 15 questions that I cover in this podcast episode will help you trim the time to develop awesome motivated seller talking to skills.

It’s important to go into each phone call from a seller with these 4 goals in mind:

1. Determine if a deal is even remotely possible (focus on what is owed… not what their asking price is)

2. Determine how motivated they are

3. Build rapport

4. Schedule an appointment immediately

The 15 questions talked about the podcast episode are presented in the order they should be asked. There is a reason for their ordering.

The biggest focus is on building rapport and getting information about their situation that they wouldn’t give something that is just hitting them up with questions without being conversational.

Enjoy the episode and be sure to down the PDF checklist of the 15 questions to make sure you ask them in the correct order. You can download the checklist at http://flippingjunkie.com/38

Chris Jameson started investing in the San Antonio real estate market in 2011 and soon after entered the private financing market. He has facilitated over $60M in loans and acquired over 60 units for his personal portfolio.

In this episode, Chris and I talk about the ins and outs of hard money loans and how to work with hard money lenders.

One of the biggest benefits for new investors is that hard money lenders can help keep you out of trouble. They usually won’t lend if the deals isn’t likely to make you money.

There are some hard money lenders that Chris calls “Loan To Own”. These lenders are more interested in creating the loan with the intention of getting the house from you when you default on the loan… usually after it’s already partially or mostly rehabbed!

Don Costa, is a married father of 3 incredible kids. He has been in the real estate business for over 10 years.He started Knocking on doors and wholesaling properties, and then quickly moved to flipping houses. He took some time off during the crash and jumped back in 2012.Currently our office is on track to do a 100 flips this year. He loves what he does and he loves helping others get into the business.

Don started flipping houses when he was unemployed. The unemployment check only covered his living expenses and so he had to find a way to find deals, get funding for them and to fix them so that he could sell them and profit.

He got a notice of default list and began going door to door to try to buy houses from the people about to face foreclosure.

To buy and fix up the houses, he worked out a deal with a money partner to joint venture. The money partner would put up the funds. He would find the deals and manage the fix up and they would split the profits 50/50.

Not all deals are 50/50, we discuss some of the other terms investors use and how those are determined. Basically, the more value you bring to the table for the joint venture, the more you should make out of the deal. If you are finding incredible deals, managing the rehabs and getting them sold, shouldn’t you be asking for a 60/40 split. Heck yes.

Don didn’t have money to make monthly payments to hard money and private money lenders. He didn’t have money to spend on rehabs before getting draws from lenders. He had to joint venture.

He still joint ventures to this day. The reason is that he always wants to do as many deals as he can. Joint venturing allows him to be able to do that.

Finding joint venture partners can be had by networking. You hear it all the time, but do you do it? That’s the real question.

Don recommends using a written agreement to make sure everybody is on the same page and understands the deal. You can click here to download the agreement he uses. (Please be sure to have an attorney review this before using it - the agreement is only provided for educational purposes)

He talks about some of the situations he’s encountered with different JVs. One wanted to know if paint from one job was going to another job if it wasn’t all used. You probably don’t want to have someone partnering with you that is concerned with such minute details.

Another thing to be careful of is partnering with someone that wants to give too much input on rehabs. You do not want to have too many chiefs trying to run things. Contractors won’t know who to listen to or to check in with about change orders, etc. You should control as much as you can.

Jason has been on the show now 3 times! It’s because he’s awesome and doing great things in his real estate investing business in Houston.

We have in on the show today to talk about finding and working with private lenders for your house flips.

Now, if you’re new to real estate investing, you probably want to start with working with a partner to fund the deal and split the profits or use hard money until you have a proven track record of several successful flips. This will make it easier to build relationships with private lenders.

In this episode we talk about:

What a private lender is

How they are different than hard money lenders

What criteria Jason uses to determine good lenders from ones he’d rather not work with

How to find these lenders during networking events

Jason really focuses on the “working” part of networking events. I think most investors in general just don’t fully appreciate the power of these events if worked properly.

When negotiating with lenders on terms, Jason likes to frame the argument by showing how he uses the lenders that give the best terms first and then moves up to more expensive ones afters he’s used all of the cheaper one’s money. So, they can ask for higher rates, but they won’t get their money out until the cheaper ones have theirs out first.

Jason also talks about his vanilla and chocolate options he gives private lenders. You’ll need to listen to the episode for that one though. :)

Learn how to flip houses through this free house flipping training course. Weekly podcast episodes show you how to get started and go from newbie to pro.

In this episode, I talk about what we've been doing with this series of podcast episodes that is meant to be a sort of weekly training that follows a specific path to take you from absolute beginner real estate investor to master pro house flipper extraordinaire.